While local hardwoods can be a pleasure to work with and can leave you with a gorgeous project, tropical hardwoods can be eye-poppingly beautiful. Whether the vividly colored bloodwood or purpleheart from South America, the highly desirable bubinga or wenge from Africa or the hard wearing teak or rosewood from Asia, these boards from the planet’s tropical areas can be a woodworker’s dream, giving your projects a style all their own.
They do come with some drawbacks, however. First, they have different characteristics than the native wood you work with, leaving a splintery mess where a clean cut should normally be. They can also be very expensive, since they have to be harvested and shipped great distances to your supplier. And, the harvesting of these trees isn’t always done in a responsible manner, possibly being pulled from forests without consideration of their future health.
This week, let us know how you feel about using these tropical hardwoods.
They are super nice, but mostly out of my budget.
I occasionally use them for accents or inlays but they are a little too gaudy for an entire piece. They help enhance contrast on a project. The prices on some of that stuff can break a shop budget real fast.
They’re great but I’ve got 1/2ton of oak in my shop from a tree I had planked. Why would I buy any sort of wood?